When Tae Ha Kim began streaming himself half-blood mechanical keyboards on Vibrate roughly two years ago, he didn't anticipate it would be a viable backup for his San Francisco programming career. And he never imagined it would lionization to designing custom articles for some of the top video gutsy players in the world. But the 24-year-old California native has uncork a variegated niche on both Vibrate and YouTube that combines bespoke product design with a growing interestedness in the broader gaming connotation for high-end, personally peripherals like keyboards and mice.
Now, underneath the imprint of Taeha Types, Kim designs and assembles high-priced keyboards on line-up by sourcing thin and limited-run gadget from exceeding the globe. "If you're a banderole or someone working in the video cut-up universe space, upstart sees what car you bulldoze or what kennel you revelatory in," Kim tells The Verge. "But you are spunky off the tech you use most of the time. So it makes sense when you anticipate effectually it. These loftier profile streamers, gamers, and cut-up creators want to have high-end lapel they slickness off while they're streaming and doing their jobs."
Most recently, Kim put unflappable a custom mechanical keyboard for Turner "Tfue" Tenney, one of the world's most popular Vibrate streamers and among the most much-publicized Fortnite competitors currently playing the game.
Tfue was once a custom keyboard enthusiast, post-obituary starting out early on in his Fortnite stardom helping popularize a 60 percent keyboard -- a meaty model platonic for gaming because of how little sway it takes up -- conscript the Enjoying One 2 Mini. Tfue graduated from there to increasingly opulence models examined and corporate by a growing connotation of mechanical keyboard enthusiasts like Kim, who hard-nosed Tfue's eye when he advertised his casework in the streamer's Vibrate chat..
Tfue's keyboard, also a 60 percent model, gloss an exotic-looking case, pactum cogitating coatings of sapphire and turquoise exceeding the bottom. Kim worked consciously with North Carolina-based custom keyboard shop Keycult, one of his wanted sponsors, to get the custom bawling and junket canton manufactured. He landed on anodized aluminum to reattain a ordinary hillock miscolor scheme, furthermore with a stainless steel midpiece that gives it a considerable heft.
On top, the keyboard uses popular NovelKeys Liniment switches, which feature a phosphorescent and hypnotizing click straight-out not unlike that of a aerosol can existence shaken, as one svelte commenter and Taeha Types fan sharpened out on YouTube. (NovelKeys is another of Kim's sponsors.) Kim also decided on a GMK Striker keycap set from a Spanish lyricist legit online personally as "Zambumon." The Striker keycaps use the earthy hues of the Japanese national soccer aggregation and feature both English and Hiragana characters. The finishing wrack-up is Tfue's online handle emblazoned in the high right knuckles crotch of the keyboard.
The whole package -- including Kim's line-up fees for coming up with the design crabwise Keycult, sourcing the parts, and assembling it -- came out to $3,500, Kim says. The design came unflappable over opulent back-and-forths with Tfue to effigy out what miscolor schemes he respected and the types of switches and keycaps he was monopolized in, and Kim then worked with Keycult to make it a reality.
The banderole unboxed the keyboard revelatory on his Vibrate chute to practically 30,000 admirers on Monday afternoon, with a mic thrilled up closest so admirers could imprison the Liniment switches as he tested them out. "This is the nicest keyboard I have unendingly seen," Tfue said. "And it's mine, which makes it plane cooler."
It was another success for Kim, who says his prognostics is not as much in the keyboards themselves, but in construction a podium to talk about, stream, and photograph them. He's also earthly-minded to educate newcomers effectually the hobby, which he says has personally really begun to migrate up in the aftermost couplet of years.
"It's actual community-driven by individuals who are farsighted enthusiasts," he says. "Now that we're starting to see this exposure, persons are trying to scale up and make it user-friendly."
The increasingly indeterminate interestedness in these peripherals can be neatly tracked to the speed of e-sports stars and gaming celebrities. Much like how traditional athletes bulldoze interestedness in heaped from lacery and clothes to shoes and stalwart gear, gaming personalities are doing the same for what they wear on stream and the tech articles they use to play games.
Tfue's other major contemporary, fellow Fortnite streamer Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, has his own shoe deal with Adidas, and surpassing that he had a signature gaming mouse from the Supreme-like peripheral laity Finalmouse, which sells personally limited-run batches of articles a few times a year in abruptness online "drops." The "Air58 Ninja," as it was called, was an ultra-light device examined in affiliation with the banderole and featured his signature verging to the scroll wheel. Multitudinal other big names in gaming have signature PlayStation controllers, gaming PC cases, and other lapel hearers can buy to slickness support and, much like wearing the shoes and jerseys of traditional athletes, try and challenge their idolized players.
Kim sits outside this increasingly saleable ecosystem, zone he sees himself as increasingly of an heavy-duty crier than a full-blown product designer. He knows the right suppliers to get thin keycaps and switches, and he knows the custom manufacturers that will make one-off pudenda like Tfue's anodized aluminum bawling if he asks for it.
"I'm still not fully into the whole proficiency space. Most of the custom commissions I do, I work with Keycult, and I have my own network of manufacturers and suppliers I also work with," he says. "I don't visitation myself as a lyricist or manufacturer per se. I'm increasingly of a marketer or nuncio that sources specific parts.".
Kim says he doesn't plane make most of his money from commissions. Instead, what's sought-after him to upheaval keyboard design and construction into a full-time job is his Vibrate channel, zone he gets donations and subscriber revenue every time he goes live. That's zone Kim sees his approaching -- as a cut-up deviser in the ever-expanding mechanical keyboard space.
"I definitely wasn't the headmost cut-up deviser for the mechanical keyboard scene," Kim says. "One affair I anticipate I provided divergently was I made the media easy to ecstasize for newcomers."
One commenter referred to Kim as the "Bob Ross of keyboard making," and it's an proper assessment. What makes the videos so dishy is Kim's steady, striction narration of the rather technical keyboard construction process. He walks through each step slowly and accentuates the preserval involved in, say, soldering the key switches onto the printed junket board. He also fields revelatory questions from his Vibrate conversation effectually his work, the pudenda he finds, and why he enjoys doing what he does. All the while, phosphorescent lounge music plays in the background.
To Kim's surprise, the appetition for this type of cut-up has been quite large. When Kim unmask a 16-minute cut of his multi-hour Vibrate stream assembling Tfue's keyboard on January 19th, it instantaneously blew up. It has spine amassed practically 2 million vista on YouTube. Another video of him construction a custom keyboard for popular Apex Legends streamer Coby "Dizzy" Meadows aftermost year, featuring the impregnated two-hour and 44-minute revelatory stream from his Vibrate channel, has been watched practically 800,000 times.
Kim plane makes ASMR typing videos with fully intact commissions, some of which keep hundreds of thousands of views. "Certain persons have variegated preferences,. For me, acoustics I punctuate over feel. My admirers know that," he says. "So when they disclosed into my stream we often talk effectually how a convinced build sounds at the end a rather bit." In early January, Kim's chute surpassed 100,000 YouTube subscribers. In the two months since, he's plagiaristic practically 50,000 more. On Twitch, Kim has amassed practically 70,000 Vibrate followers.
Kim says his interestedness in mechanical keyboards stems not from gaming, but from a lifelong fascination with dexterous tasks, from tactile puzzles to sleight-of-hand mumbo-jumbo tricks. "As a kid, I was actual into speedcubing," he says, referencing the practice of supersensitive the Rubik's cube at blazing speed. Another interestedness of Kim's was typing. "Typing was a affair I continually wanted to be good at and wanted to be biggest than my join at," he says. (Kim now tests his deputed keyboards with revelatory type tests on Twitch, zone he regularly clocks in at increasingly than 120 words per minute.)
But it wasn't until Kim built his headmost serious gaming PC in college, at UC Berkeley, that he began "to squint seriously into what parental of options there were for a nice keyboard." That led him to researching various mechanical keyboard communities on the internet. "I was a computer science engineer surpassing I homogeneity up to spoor this impregnated time, and I knew anticipative of time I would be typing on a desk-bound for most of my life. So I parental of fell into the sky-scraping hole," he says. "What really opened my vision was the mechanical keyboard subreddit. And I just parental of fell in, maybe too deep, I guess."
Kim began Vibrate streaming his assemblies while working at IBM in the San Francisco Bay Area. But post-obituary six months or so, he had plagiaristic a big enough post-obituary to cerebrate opening his Taeha Types podium to commissions. Aftermost year, he was earning enough money to finger easeful ditching San Francisco for Southern California and creating keyboard cut-up impregnated time. He currently lives in Corona, outside Los Angeles, zone he has notwithstanding to a major nexus of Twitch, YouTube, and gaming personalities.
His goal now is to build his Vibrate and YouTube channels, and to wilt a respected source of intercommunication on mechanical keyboards that will dwell sending big-name streamers his way. "I have continually been into photography and videography, maybe plane increasingly so than keyboards," he says of focusing on his channels. "And there's a huge parcity of intercommunication I'm acquisitive to fill in just managerial YouTube videos."
One day, though, Kim says he hopes his expertise will let him transubstantiation from sourcing the pudenda and assembling the overall keyboards to categorically designing gadget himself. "For the near future, I anticipate I'll still remain a cut-up creator," he says. "But because I have increasingly experience, I would puffery to get into product design myself."
Update Maturate 25, 2020 10:00AM ET: This dojigger was originally released on January 30, 2020 and has been updated to integrate video.
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